Today was meant to be the start of a lawsuit by Grammy Award winner Maria Schneider against YouTube in federal court over anti-piracy tools. Now, Maria Schneider and YouTube have agreed to have the came dismissed with prejudice, meaning she can not try to sue over this again.
Back in 2020, Maria Schneider filed a class action lawsuit against YouTube for “massive deficiencies in its copyright enforcement measures.” The trial was scheduled to begin on June 12th.
Unfortunately, towards the end of May, a federal judge decided the case could not continue as a class action lawsuit including 10,000 to 20,000 copyright owners, as the rightsholders’ cases were too different to be certified as a class action lawsuit.
“It has been said that copyright claims are poor candidates for class-action treatment, and for good reason. Every copyright claim turns upon facts which are particular to that single claim of infringement [and] every copyright claim is also subject to defenses that require their own individualized inquiries,” said Judge James Donato.
His decision dwindled the number of copyright owners involved in the case to Maria Schneider, Uniglobe Entertainment, and AST Publishing. Schneider requested the postponement on June 5th, saying the trial will be “enormously wasteful” in light of Judge Donato’s decision that “gravely undermines” her case less than a month before the trial was scheduled to begin.
Her lawyers have responded with the following statement:
“The named plaintiffs here joined the case to litigate class claims, and to vindicate their view that YouTube tramples on the rights of independent artists and smaller copyright holders overall, not just those of the individual plaintiffs. A brief stay here to allow this court to ensure that the district court’s last-minute, haphazard, and erroneous conclusion that this case cannot be tried on a classwide basis does not endanger the progress of this litigation.”
At first, Judge Donato declined to grant a postponement and is set on starting the trial as previously scheduled after losing that both sides have decided to have the case dismissed.
You can find the full ruling over at TorrentFreak that dismisses this case.